There are 10 months of the year that lack an LD contest. This simply cannot stand. It is a blight on the game development community. I feel that by filling those months, we will attract more regulars and more interest, and LD will be more popular. But on the flipside, LD is a special event, twice a year, a big deal. If it happened every month, you’d only have a small percentage of the contestants in any given event (and very little overlap, so you’d never get to know anybody). And so the proposal:
The LD48 Mini-Contest. All that I am about to say is just the proposal and up for discussion as to what is right or whether it’s just stupid in general. This is just my original basic idea for it. It runs once a month, on the first weekend. It does not occur in April and whatever other month Real-LD happens in (shouldn’t there be an official month for that too?).
There is no theme voting – the host simply dictates the theme. Themes for this are encouraged to be different from the type that LD48 uses, though the host does whatever they want. Basically, I’m picturing setting up a specific challenge for people, rather than a general theme. Like we might finally see the “no graphics” theme in the form of “Make a game that communicates with the user only through sound. The player can communicate back by any method you want.” Something like that, but also something that can be shorthanded to one or two words if needed (“Audio only”), so people don’t have to explain the theme every time they talk about their game to other people. Other challenges might be things like “Here’s a set of tiles, make a game with them”, “A maze game featuring zombies that is 64k or less zipped” (blah, I wouldn’t enter that one), or “You just got the Fight Club license. Deadline is in 48 hours. Go!” (I could see that one with a lot of movies… Office Space!) If people don’t like your challenge, who cares? There’s a new one next month.
Host also dictates the start time, so that he gets to announce the theme at a time convenient for him rather than at 4am. Contestants have 48 hours from that start time to finish their project, just like in LD.
Rules are relaxed – you can use anything you want to make your game, start with any code. If you just want to mod your existing game, go for it. It’s almost the opposite idea as LD is – instead of seeing what you can build from scratch, we want to see what you are capable of with unlimited resources (and very limited time). Content is just as unrestricted, just keep it legal.
The source code rule is equally relaxed (and rightly so, since you can use code that you’re not allowed to share anyway!). We’d really like you to post your source, but it’s optional.
People sign up on a list to host this, first-come, first-serve. You can sign up again only once your last hosting is off the list. This means Fydo gets to run a Kitties contest. Hosting is entirely simple: just come up with a theme and announce it when the time comes. Phil’s amazing wordpress code does the rest, letting people upload their entries (well, links and such) and shutting it all off when the time comes. All mini-LDs would go in one wordpress category, maybe, so we didn’t keep adding categories all the time. Don’t have that bit worked out at the moment.
Hosts can participate in the contest too, even though they know the theme in advance. We’ll trust their integrity. Probably hosting would have some simple restriction on it, like you must have been in 3 real LDs previously (or you must spend at least 70% of your life lurking in #ludumdare), so we don’t get a flood of people signing up and disappearing.
After the 48 hours, the entries are up for voting, and you don’t have to have entered to vote. You just need to be signed up on this site, to encourage people to check out the entries and see what they think. The voting (which Phil of course implements for us!) is simpler than the full-on LD, maybe just 1 category: Awesomeness (maybe Gnarliness, or Radicality, or maybe it shows it with a random name each time, or does the host get to choose the category too!?). You rate it 1-100, so it’s kind of like grading a paper. Voting can simply remain open until the next Mini-LD (or actual LD) starts.
Of course, each of these mini-LDs will get a much smaller number of competitors, and nobody would do them all (well, somebody would, I bet you, but not many), but they are a nice option for the bleak wasteland of empty existence between LD48s. I don’t think they’d detract from the bigness and participation of the real LDs, given their smallness and unofficiality. My hope is that they’d pull more people in for those. And we always have people in #ld saying “boy, I need a new LD!”, and with this, there’d always be one of sorts around the corner.
And yeah, it’s more work for Phil to get it up and working, but that’s what he’s here for, right? What else is he good for?
Discuss.
Tags: contests, proposal
